The Shonky Awards are where we name and shame the products, services and companies taking advantage of Australian consumers. Have you seen a product or service you’d like to nominate for a Shonky?
Make your nomination using this quick survey or leave a comment below and we’ll consider it for the Shonky awards coming up this November.
Lucent Globe - shonky of the shonkies advertisers!
Lucent Globe,
dishwasher sheets does not clean dishes in my dishwasher. I contacted them and they passed the buck eventually saying the problem was my 10 year old dishwasher. Gave no comment when I said X brand works perfectly.
Woolworths branded lime juice 250ml plastic bottle costs $1
Woolworths branded lime juice 250ml plastic bag costs $3.75
Something dodgy going on here so just letting you know about the 375% markup (also the bottle is easier to seal and store).
Hi @Connedsumer, welcome to the community.
Nothing dodgy. The 250mL bottle is an imported reconstituted juice, while the 250mL pouch is Australian lime juice. This is why there is a price difference, as they aren’t the same product.
How about the national power grids? They are shown to be regularly over-voltage and often well over-voltage. It costs more to produce and shortens the life of appliances.
Since 2000 the specification has been 230V +10%/-6%, or 243V-216V. In contrast
More of the same and one more reason to call the electrical energy regulators and industry out for misleading consumers.
Suggesting customers change how and when they use electricity can be beneficial is not a shonky. It’s that what has been promoted and implemented does not deliver on the promise.
The entire offshore Internet selling industry that dupes Australians into believing they are dealing with an Australian seller. Using .au domain names, Australian symbols like the flag, claiming shipping comes from fake Australian sites when the goods or services just come from overseas.
Pestly Pest Control Melbourne (see thread of that name). I think they qualify for a Choice investigation, anyhow.
Commbank which sneaked in extra CC fees in July. In my case, $6/month. I checked back through my emails and nope, no notification. It had been fee free since I switched from a card which carried rewards, to a low interest card, which did not.
I’d like to nominate Telstra for its predatory approach to pre-paid recharging.
If you recharge a Telstra pre-paid manually, you have a number of payment options. You’re not limited to credit card.
The catch is that if you pay manually before the expiry date (to make sure your payment’s received in time), you lose the day/s that remained on the current recharge, because the new recharge period begins on the day you pay, and the expiry date of the new recharge is that number of day/s earlier than the previous one.
No compensation is given for the lost days you’d already paid for.
Just to clarify: I’m talking about recharges that are just extending the existing prepaid plan – not switching plans.
So you must either pay on the expiry date – and risk losing some service and/or your ‘data bank’ if the payment isn’t processed immediately – or configure auto-recharge.
But the catch with auto-recharge is that the only payment method allowed is credit card.
Why is credit card the only acceptable auto-recharge option?
Somehow, some other mobile plan providers are able to keep the existing recharge period and not steal the remaining days if recharge payment is made before the expiry date.
Some will accept auto-recharge via methods other than credit card.
Some will even record a credit for days not used if you cancel a plan! Gasp!
Not Telstra.
Thank you phb.
I actually purchased a 250ml pouch of the local lime juice from Big W.
While it tastes nicer than the bottled product it tastes maybe 10%-20% nicer so I would not mind paying up to a 50% premium because it is Australian.
For cooking purposes it is be hard to justify the extra (375%) expense and whilst I love to support local farmers $4L vs $15L just don’t cut the ice.
Plastics recycling deserves a special mention. It’s a special category where multiple businesses including many manufacturers and importers through to retailers and local government all play a role.
Instead of those creating the problem being held to account consumers are typically left with the problem. It’s not just direct costs or the many hidden environmental impacts that consumers carry. And too often left to the consumer to find a better solution. The most complex outcome the unwanted legacy that has been created for future generations.
Some of the hard evidence -
Our pet hates are the soft plastic wrappers used for food items such as chips (crisps) and various forms of metalised films, (composite foils and blister packs for tablets).
I found the ECA report to be vague and unpolished. Technical terms are not explained, graphs lack explanatory detail. The data presented may somehow support their conclusion that cost-reflective network tariffs aren’t very cost-reflective but I don’t see where. There seems to be information that most networks have spare capacity most of the time but how they relates to costs is not explained. If my people had produced that material for general population readership I would have told them to go back and do better.
With Halloween almost upon us, I nominate every single store selling unrecyclable plastic Halloween junk merchandise.
As an example, but by no means the only one, KMart has “eerie essentials” for Halloween at “low prices for life”:
Just a few of these “essentials”:
None of it recyclable, and so cheap (in all senses) that it’s highly unlikely to be stashed away and re-used next year, so it’ll end up either as litter or going to landfill. More animals and birds will die tangled up in crap like plastic webs or with stomachs or crops full of plastic. Finally, it’ll break down into yet more microplastics.
“Essentials”? 
I’m not sure if this fits in with your Shonky awards but I was interested in the Better beds sheet band to prevent sheet movement. When I went to purchase it they wanted $90 delivery fee. I decided to put up with the sheets the way they were.
These, and the plastic wraps and trays that a lot of fruit and veg arrive in.
Blister packs for tablets originally came, I think, as a result of people overdosing from bottles. So bottles gradually disappeared when the drug companies realised it was cheaper to use the blister packs. And then of course we have Webster Packs (or similar) which the pharmacy dispenses/organises for people who cant keep track of the meds they may (or not) have taken. I don’t think they replaced anything.
I still get a couple of my meds dispensed in bottles. Just waiting for the inevitable.
They are essentials and our decorations have lasted for many years and we haven’t had to top them up in ages.
It’s the huge amount of xmas stuff that’s about to come out that’s the real problem on a massive scale.
That, too.
